On "Passion"

Recently, I saw the education documentary Waiting for Superman with my parents. Afterwards, over lunch, my father shook his head. “Watching that makes me think that nothing will ever change,” he said.

“Then do something about it,” I countered, and went through the now clichéd save-education to-do list (write your senator, get involved in the school board, educate yourself, read Whatever It Takes) to no avail. Eventually, I gave up convincing Dad and we moved onto other topics. Still, his despondency nagged at me; I don’t think his reaction is at all unusual.

As a teacher in a charter school that serves a low-income, immigrant community in Chicago, I work with large class sizes, students who are working years below grade level, and teachers who work around the clock to help students succeed. Despite the challenges, I believe that things can and will eventually change. But, people have to get riled up to change it—call it stubborn, foolhardy, or call it a “passion for education.”

The idea of “passion” is one that comes up often. Pretty much every teacher claims to have a “passion for education” and the idea of “passion” for students, or for learning, is thrown around so often that at times it seems to have lost its meaning. So, I was pleased to come across Steven Anderson’s recent blog post in which he argues that passion is a prerequisite for any kind of educational reform and I couldn’t agree more.

In his post, Anderson outlines his definition of passion in education is (I’ll refer you to his blog post for more) and I challenged myself to do the same. So, here are my personal criteria for passion in special education:

Passion is coming to school every day committed to meeting each child where they are, whether that means handling a temper tantrum before you’ve even finished your coffee, figuring out new ways to teach phonics to a child who’s struggled with reading for years, or losing your planning period to help a student.

Passion is advocating for your students’ academic and emotional needs, and not accepting limitations, ignorance, or insensitive comments imposed on or about them by adults.

Passion is building classrooms that are learning environments for all kids, including buying materials after school-provided resources run out, planning lessons that meet their learning needs when there are none in the curriculum, and going off-lesson to teach the skills the kids need right now.

Passion is doing what’s best for your students, even if it means going back to the drawing board and recreating a lesson cycle from the beginning when you realize it’s not working, changing your behavior to meet the needs of a child, and starting with empathy every time you approach a challenging situation.

Passion means not letting yourself, your colleagues, or your students reach the point of apathy, no matter how difficult it is for the students to learn, or you to teach.

Passion is building relationships with individual students, teachers, and parents, and working within those relationships to collaborate, solve problems, and move forward together.

While I’m sure that education in America will get better, I’m also just as sure that nothing will improve without passion to drive it. If you’re an educator, parent, or just a tax-payer or documentary-viewer, what is your passion for education? And, what will you do with it? 

Fluency Update: Reading The True Story of the Three Little Pigs

I started the fluency focused readers’ theatre lesson cycle this week (as mentioned in last week’s post). To start the three-week lesson, six students in third, fourth, and fifth grade practiced The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.

On Monday, they were introduced to the idea of reading fluency (it’s “reading like you talk,” as defined by one of my students) and started reading the scripts. At first, I had them read the scripts in pairs, alternating lines, so that they had the opportunity to read the entire script through instead of memorizing a few lines. On Tuesday and Wednesday they kept reading different roles and worked on answering comprehension questions about the play. On Thursday they got their official “roles” and on Friday they read their scripts into a podcast recording. Throughout the week, we talked about how to increase fluency—working on words in the script that were hard (porker, wrong, and honor) and adding voice and expression to the lines.

Over the course of the week, two things surprised me. First, they didn’t get bored. I was worried that, reading the same lines over and over would become tedious, especially for these students who tend to jump to the next book, activity, or even sentence before fully understanding the initial one. But, when it did get a little boring for them, I was able jump in and challenge them with prompts such as: How do you think the wolf would say that? Or, imagine how you would feel if you were in that situation, how would your voice sound?

I was also surprised at how easy to find “new” learning for every student. On Monday, they were all working on decoding and phonics, though some more than others. By Friday, two students were still decoding and working on phonics. Two others were working on increasing their speed and accuracy with the lines. And, the final two were working on adding voice and expression where they hadn’t before. That was a nice change—usually, in a one-week plan that focuses on a specific skill, by Friday I have kids who are bored and kids who still “don’t get it.”

This coming week, they’ll be working with scripts that are a little more challenging but, judging by the comments after they recorded The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, (That was fun! Are we recording next week too?) they’re ready for it.

Building Reading Fluency

During the second quarter, which officially started a few weeks ago, I’ve shifted focus from teaching phonics to teaching reading fluency, especially with a group of third, fourth, and fifth graders that have mastered the basics, but are still “struggling readers.” Focusing on fluency, the ability to read accurately (quickly and correctly) and with expression, I think, will help them enjoy reading and understand more of what they read as they connect words they read with words they hear.

Fluency, I think, is one of the most difficult qualities to develop in students who are struggling with reading. It comes so naturally to some students, even as it eludes others. I have worked with students who struggle with phonics yet, even as they stumble over words, some aspects of fluency—the rise and fall of their voice as they read, the inflection they give to punctuation, their expression as they read dialogue—is impeccable. Other readers, who can sound out any word presented to them, read in stifled monotone, as if every word is one more step in a torturous journey towards finishing the chapter.

I recently researched the topic of reading fluency and learned that it’s a hard won skill for kids—requiring both repeated reading and reading many different texts. For my students, repeated reading can be challenging and they lose interest quickly, while at the same time, building the ability to read many different texts poses its own challenge as they work to transfer knowledge (word skills, sight words) they used in one text to a book that, on the cover at least, looks completely different.

So, in my group of upper elementary students, whose reading levels and fluency ability are incredibly diverse, I’ve struggled with just how to approach the idea of fluency, and how to get them to practice it in a way that introduces something new for each child. I’ve decided to focus on reader’s theatre with a few different plays, and strategies to teach them the importance of reading fluently.

The guiding questions: How does reading fluency enhance how we enjoy and understand what we read? How does our reading fluency enhance how we communicate what we read to others?

In this unit:

• I’m focusing on explicit instruction in the components of fluent reading with guided notes on how to read expression—what readers do when they read a period, exclamation point, and question mark, as well as notes on how to read emphasized text (text that is written in italics, bold font, or capitalized letters).
• As they read, the students will discuss how to read sentences with expression, reading parts of sentences, pausing for commas, and adding voice to dialogue.
• Twice each week, as a class, they’re going to do Reading A to Z's “zipper reads” procedure, a way of repeated reading that encourages kids to track their own accuracy and word comprehension. Eventually, I will have them graph their progress, so each student can see how their fluency improved over the weeks.
• As they practice their scripts, they’ll be working towards reading the script for a podcast recording that they can share with their parents, or with another class.

I'm excited to see the growth that the combination of instruction, group practice, and small group work with scripts that are interesting to them (one of the plays is the script of the novel that my fifth grade students are reading, The Best Christmas Pageant Every by Barbara Robinson), and the ultimate goal of helping them hear themselves read, will bring about in this group of students. 

If you’re working on building fluency in your class, don’t start without reading the resources from Reading Rockets, a public television resource with information and strategies.

New Tech Tool: Wall Wisher

Via my Twitter account, I came upon a cool new (or new to me) web tool that I’d like to start using in my class. It’s called Wall Wisher and can be used as an online posting board. Good for teachers: there are settings that you can use to make sure that the wall doesn’t get overrun with spam (I set mine to only post things that I approved as the wall manager).

I’ve created my own Wall and posted a question (please visit and respond!) and thought of a few ways to use this tool in class:

Ø Post a discussion question for a book you’re reading and have students add their comments or thoughts at home or on the class computers as a Do Now or Center activity.

Ø Post a math problem and have students post different ways of solving it.

Ø Have students post math problems for other students to solve, see who can post the most difficult problem (the catch, you can’t post a problem unless you can solve it yourself).

Ø As you’re planning lessons, have students post what they want to study or what they’re struggling with (anonymously) so you can plan to focus on what the want to learn, or what they need to review.

Ø Post a topic and have students post links to web sites, videos, and other information they find about that topic, creating an online research wall.

Ø Post the nightly homework online and encourage students to post questions about homework or other class assignments that other students and you can answer, creating a place for them to go first, before either calling, getting frustrated, or quitting their at-home work.

Finding Truth in Nonfiction

I started teaching the concepts of fiction and nonfiction with my fifth grade book group this week and I ran into a few challenges that I hadn’t expected.

First, I let them choose the book (from a few options that I gave them based on their reading level and the book sets that I found in libraries around school) and they choose Vampires Don't Wear Polka Dots by Debbie Daley (part of the Bailey School Kids series). The book ended up being my first challenge: it isn’t one that I would have chosen for this particular topic. Still, as we’re halfway through the book and they’re enjoying reading it, I surged ahead.

Next challenge: how to teach the idea of nonfiction in a fiction book group. In discussion with my colleagues, we talked about focusing on the idea that authors use nonfiction to enhance fiction. I liked this idea a lot. First, because I think nonfiction and fiction are typically taught separately, and this would merge the two. Also, it’s a great way to encourage kids to think about what authors do to influence the readers’ experience with a story or book. And, because I tend to read more nonfiction, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction than novels, and would like to bring more nonfiction into my classroom and this seems like a great way to do just that.

I kicked off the topic on Friday with the question: Do authors do research in order to write fiction? Why or why not?

Right away, one of my students answered that yes, authors do research because they have to get the details right (in our current story, the details of what vampires are supposed to look like and do). The discussion that resulted was a great one—a million miles from my actual lesson plan, and I couldn’t have been happier.

We talked about the kind of research that an author would have to do in order to write a book for kids. They’d have to get the dialogue right, capture the experience of kids talking on the playground, or make a classroom “feel” right to a kid who’s reading it, all things that an adult would have to do research to figure out.

We also talked about the kind of research that an author would have to do to write another kind of book. I had brought in the novel I was reading, House Rules by Jodi Picoult, a story about a main character who has Asperger’s. I talked about my experience of reading the book and liking that Picoult had done the research that helped her write a believable character and, if she hadn’t, I would have shut the book and never read another book by her because I wouldn’t trust her to tell an authentic story. (To this, one of my students suggested that if Picoult hadn’t written a story that felt right to me I should sue her, and I told him that, while I appreciated the emotion behind his idea, I thought maybe not buying another book would be penalty enough.)

In all, I was pretty impressed with my students. The discussion went in an entirely different direction than I’d expected, and, especially for the introduction of a topic, involved much less lecture and more question and answer. I think in the long run, this will be a topic that we return to again and again as we read, rather than a one-time lesson cycle.

Here are some discussion questions for the theme of nonfiction in fiction:

· How does nonfiction enhance fiction?

· What does it mean for a book to be “authentic”?

· How does research make a book authentic for the reader?

· What do authors (who are grown-ups) have to know about kids to write child characters?

· How authentic is the book you’re reading? What do you think the author had to do to create such an authentic story? Or, what should the author have done to make the story more authentic?

Book Review: Masterpiece by Elise Broach

There's no other word for it, the story in Masterpiece (2010) is wonderful! I loved every page of this book. You could compare it to The Littles by John Peterson (little people living in walls and helping the people they live with) or Cricket in Times Square by George Selden (a classic with a curious and likeable bug for a main character), but I prefer to keep this book on its own.

Broach’s story is original; a beetle that lives in a Manhattan kitchen find that he has a talent for drawing miniature drawings. James, the boy who lives in that Manhattan apartment, finds a drawing by Marvin and shows it to his parents. His father, an artist, thinks that James drew it and introduces him to a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where James is commissioned to draw more miniature drawings in the vein of Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer to help with an art theft investigation.

I love how Broach works with the theme of friendship. Marvin makes sacrifices for his human friend, James, who seems to appreciate Marvin, but also uses him a little. So, while Marvin is happy to create pictures for James, it raises the question of what people should give up for friendship?

In terms of a book to teach, there’s something for everyone in Masterpiece. History and art for kids who are interested in drawing, thievery and mystery for children who like a problem to solve, and a genuine relationship between the beetle and the boy for kids who love books about unexpected friendships. For me, I liked the beetle character, and the plot development, complete with surprising twists, action, and a dose of art history.

Here are a few ways to incorporate Masterpiece into a late-elementary classroom:

Focus on the theme of friendship: What do you need to have in a friendship? How does friendship involve sacrifice? What does Marvin sacrifice for James? What does James sacrifice for Marvin? What do you think will happen to their friendship next?

Focus on the theme of family: Compare and contrast the two families in the book (the beetles and the humans). What did each family want? How did each family show emotion and affection for each other? Which family would you rather be a part of and why?

Identify the idea of Plot and Subplot: Make a graphic organizer that shows the plot and subplot in this book. Why did the author include a subplot? What did it add to the experience of reading it?

Study foreshadowing and plot twists: Create a detailed graphic organizer of the plot. Highlight parts where there was foreshadowing. Highlight places in the story where you were surprised. How did the author surprise you? Do you think the author added foreshadowing as she wrote or she went back in and added it later? Why?

Focus on Point of View: This book was told from Marvin’s point of view. Why did Broach choose the bug’s point of view? And, how would the story be different if it was told from James’ point of view?

Book Review: The GollyWhopper Games

One part Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one part kids quiz show, The GollyWhopper Games (2009) combines a child’s fantasy (Gil Goodson is part of the ultimate challenge that takes place in a toy factory) with competition (Gil has to finish puzzles and challenges to win the ultimate prize, competing against his neighborhood friends and enemies) and a modern twist (video cameras follow his every move, a tactic that today’s Reality TV kids will appreciate).

As an adult, this book wasn’t that thrilling for me to read, honestly, but I think that my fifth grade students would love it. I could see them stopping to figure out each challenge with Gil, competing along with him, and loving the conflict in the book—that Gil’s father was fired from the GollyWhopper toy company and Gil is in the competition to avenge his family’s honor and win enough money to move out of town.

As an instructional book, this would make a great read aloud. While I read it, I found myself pausing with questions that I would ask if I was reading it aloud to a class. Most of my questions were about author choices: Why did Feldman choose this cast of characters? (A mix of strangers that Gil did like and people that Gil knew but didn’t like.) Why did she give Carol, the woman who instructs the kids through the competition, such a sarcastic voice? Why does Feldman choose to have Gil fail after the maze challenge? Why does she have him then come back for the climax of the story? What hints and foreshadowing does Feldman include? How do you think she organized her thoughts as she wrote to include them all at just the right spot in the book?